CosmiKnot

The Fungus Foray and Rhizomatic Being Full Fungus Foray images Before setting off on today’s fungus foray I’d been thinking about memory. About how memory is perhaps not simply within the brain waiting to be picked up off the shelf but rather is in the objects around us. I was standing in the back garden looking at my neighbour from hell’s ladder. I found it hard to look at the ladder without relieving the various kinds of abuse we have suffered at his hands. (Thanks to a police visit he seems to have gotten the message that everyone has a right to live without fear of abuse). Still I was ok and it seemed to demonstrate how objects in the outside world don’t just trigger memory they help embody it. Ever since attending a lecture about consciousness by Marcus du Sautoy (Professor for public understanding of science at Oxford University) at The Barbican I’ve had a sense of unease about the way we conceive of our consciousness from a machine-like perspective. It’s similar to visual...

Kings place. Oh my god I’m back You finally did it How can I be so curmudgeonly as to deny the seduction at play? Oh the pristine vintage cobbles The plate glass fronted warehouse arches Framing slim silhouete of new student Who sips coffee Totally amazing tote bags University of the Arts Tram lines flow encased at floor level As archival patina Of an industrious past It’s all good How can I fail to see that this is betterer Double plus gooderer I visit an exhibition of Soviet childrens books Encased in glass Remember the smell of mildew? Its freezing here comrade. I grasp and gasp Hoping for the oxygen of something actual The fleeting memory of a real experience An actual event. There is a hand printed lino cut cover For A Russian book of Walt Whitman’s O Pioneer. Is this it? The moment that evaded the death grip The strangulation by equivalence? Asphixiation by reproductive thingness. I think it is And a part of me celebr...

Growing up then Is the move into a state of detachment It is the move into the realm Of subject and object Where what was once real is Redelivered as an orange Endorphin promoting chance card That niggles your synaptic network Then and only then When real life is a series of printed or onscreen equivalence Can your grown up mind Pen you into the rational domain By telling you that the embodied life of felt sense is in the past And therefore pure nostalgia Which we all know is bad And then it will continually feed you Golden nuggets of vintage Leaving you too woozy to care

The train conductors are now falling ill The railway company says the strike is not necessary It does not think - why are they striking? Let alone Why are they falling ill? This is because the railway company thinks in binary efficiency Empathy cannot be captured in units Metric tables cannot explain why they are unhappy Unhappy at being communicated with in binary The railway company does not compute The railway company is a vulcan culture Magnetic data strip memories The conducting people make bad jokes They are humans after all In the interests of safety Please don't stand on the tables Now they are falling ill Being treated like a piece of data makes you sick Unless you are sick already The art school lecturers are falling ill also Like the islanders drinking stagnant water Wondering why they have the shits They keep turning water into why? The binary why brigade History is the lives of individual people Says the academic cultural materialist Hurrying ...

They are talking about education on the radio. I haven’t really heard enough to workout the specifics but the gist is about how we could change education if we could start again. I think they are saying that social relations ought to be made part of the experience. I just suddenly thought what an insane world we live in that we are able to convince ourselves that an education system based on competition is in any way an evolved way of organising our lives. This tells me that I am not a realist. I mean a realist would say, “that is the way of the world so we must prepare our children for it”. That was in a deep resonant alpha control voice in case you didn’t pick that up. The other thing we’d say is something about human nature and that we can’t change that. This all makes me realise the eternal paradox of being human. The enlightenment tried to help us evolve through the use of reason and higher thinking but that ended in lots of heads being chopped off and scientism trapping us in a ...

Celts: Art and Identity – The British Museum As an exhibition this was a major influence of my Deadend works in how it openly struggled to present an ostensibly unknowable culture within the structuralist framework of received knowledge. It highlighted the problem of analysing (a) culture through the fixed parameters of current evidence based frameworks. There could be no clearer illustration of the distortion or impasse created by subject object separation. Each age projects an idea of itself onto the past – this is particularly apparent within the industrial Victorian romanticisation of the Celt. This apparent presentation of subjectivity as truth is what Cultural Materialism and Nonrepresentational theory redress. Gundestrup Cauldron C150-50 BC

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